Why did 'The Daily' fail?

12/3/12 4:37 PM EST

Rupert Murdoch's iPad only tabloid 'The Daily,' which will cease to be this month, seemed doomed almost from inception.

Still, you have to give credit to Murdoch for trying to innovate, even if he did it in the wrong way. At the very least, he's provided the industry with some lessons going forward.

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal cites three reasons for its failure: It was built on the false premise of a "general reader," it thought it could control the distribution outlet, and it was not tuned for 'sharing,' in the digital sense. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici cites three reasons for failure as well: It was too expensive, it was platform-agnostic, and it tried to be The New York Post.

The arguments about platform and distribution are, I would argue, the essential ones: You can't control the distribution outlet. That's not just because relatively few people own an iPad. It's because even those who do want to be able to share information on other platforms.

Not being able to 'share' The Daily's content was, for Madrigal, the "cardinal sin":

How would anyone build an audience growth strategy without relying on huge social hits and a distinctive voice? How many content sites or apps have you visited as a result of marketing? Then how many did you go back to? Without the actual mechanism of HUMANS DROPPING A PAPER AT YOUR DOOR, there's just no way to keep people coming back without A) a voice/POV/knowledge base that is impossible to find elsewhere B) massive traction day after day after day after day after day after day after day in the social world, light and dark forms alike. I haven't seen a digital media play succeed in the last five years without both of these factors.

t's not a technical proposition to get people to share your content. Sure, there are things you can do that marginally improve your share rates by placing the buttons in the right places, etc. But the main determinant of social sharing is the quality, tone, and form of your stories. The only way to figure out what works -- because it's constantly evolving -- is to keep sending work you love out into the ecosystem and seeing what gets amplified. Then, you take that feedback, write another thing you love and send it back into the field. If a bunch of stuff sits behind a paywall, that iterative cycle gets broken. You don't know what's working.

You can argue about cost, content and audience all you want. The principle problem for The Daily is that no matter what it was producing, there was no way to get it into the bloodstream. No one ever said -- or, more importantly, tweeted -- "Hey, did you see that article in 'The Daily'?"

That said, content was an issue. If 'The Daily' had been breaking news and publishing must-read stories every day, those stories would have been cited by the news outlets that are in the bloodstream. Such citations were rare.